2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel positions gender as a central lens for interpreting Great Lakes history from the early 1700s to the mid-1800s by demonstrating that multiple forms of labor performed by women of African, Native, and European descent shaped important events in the region, including political conflicts, legal trials, and treaties. Taking women of different racial backgrounds and the various forms of labor they engaged in as departure points, these papers explore the relationship between gender, racialized labor, and French, British and American forms of colonialism in the Great Lakes.  From the labor of enslaved women of Native and African descent in the Illinois Country under French rule, to French and Native women’s procurement of trade goods in eighteenth-century economic hubs after the British gained control of the region, to the relationship between Ojibwe women’s production of maple sugar and the expanding American republic in the nineteenth century, this panel explores the various ways women with differing access to power performed multiple forms of labor as a central part of their livelihood. Together these papers illustrate how women accessed and participated in economic networks while control of the region shifted between imperials powers and non-Native settlement intensified throughout the Great Lakes.  By looking at the ways women engaged in free and unfree labor, this panel makes both historiographical and methodological interventions by foregrounding the importance of a gendered and racialized history of labor in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Great Lakes.